


Stitches

by watcherofworlds



Series: Whumptober 2019 [11]
Category: Arrow (TV 2012), DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: Angst, Doomworld AU, Doomworld Felicity Smoak, Episode: s02e16 Doomworld, Gen, Prompt Fill, Stitches, Whumptober, Whumptober 2019, injuries
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-12
Updated: 2019-10-12
Packaged: 2020-12-12 05:42:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20998580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/watcherofworlds/pseuds/watcherofworlds
Summary: Prompt fill for Whumptober Day 11 "Stitches"





	Stitches

**Author's Note:**

> Remember when I said I would revisit Doomworld one day? Well, here it is!

Felicity looked down at the gash on the inside of her forearm, gaping like an open mouth, then at the surgical needle in her opposite hand, and wondered why she was having so much trouble with this. She had watched Oliver do it a hundred thousand times, had done it _for_ Oliver a hundred thousand times, and yet she couldn’t seem to manage to do it herself now. But she knew she would have to. She couldn’t very well continue on as normal with a gaping, untreated wound.

Gathering her resolve, Felicity began the long, slow, laborious process of stitching the gash on her forearm closed. She winced at each pass of the needle through her flesh, and gritted her teeth against the pain of the needle dragging the thread along with it, drawing the edges of her wound together. She remembered watching Oliver tend to a bullet wound on his ankle in exactly this way and barely flinching, and she wondered now, as she had wondered then, how he had managed it. Clearly, his pain tolerance had been higher than hers.

Finally, the work was done. Felicity set down the needle and thread and examined her handiwork while she waited for the adrenaline to wear off and her hands to stop shaking. Her stitches were messy, but that was to be expected. She was still relatively new to being a solo vigilante, and wasn’t particularly practiced at performing this type of operation on herself. Whether due to the quality of her stitches or the severity of the wound itself, it was clear that it would leave behind a scar when the sutures came out, just one more to add to her growing collection. She’d been a vigilante for five years, but now she was really starting to look like one.

With a sigh, Felicity packed up the needle and thread in the first aid kit and stowed it away where she always kept it. Then she made herself a cup of dark, bitter tasting coffee. She’d learned to like it black- cream and sugar could be hard to come by when you were a wanted vigilante hiding out from bounty hunters employed by a mayor who wanted you dead. 

_ I’m becoming more like Oliver every day _ , Felicity thought as she took a seat at the table where, in less dark times, Team Arrow had held its group strategy sessions, remembering his collection of scars, the consequence of ten years of hell, and that he used to take his coffee black.

The thought of Oliver sent a pang through her, a reminder that, of all the scars in her growing collection, there was one that would never heal- her heart was a mass of emotional scar tissue, and its every beat was painful. She didn’t know how to do this without Oliver, without her team and her friends. She’d never imagined that she would ever have to learn how. But now, here she was, muddling through her pain and grief, slowly learning how to be Overwatch without a Team Arrow. 

Reaching into the inside pocket of her coat that lay directly over her heart with fumbling fingers, Felicity pulled out the photograph of Oliver that she always kept there, with her always as a reminder of why she was fighting, why she was carrying on this crusade even though she was the only one left to fight left to fight it, the only one left who even knew or cared about it in the first place. 

“I wish you were here right now,” she told the photograph, because she couldn’t tell Oliver, staring into his bright blue eyes and picturing their spark in her mind’s eye, the spark that still images could never quite manage to capture. “I wish you could tell me what to do, or insist that I already know what to do and I just need to trust myself enough to do it. I don’t know how to do this without you.”


End file.
